Education in an increasingly digitalised world represents dynamic social developments and a rapidly developing field of research in which new innovative concepts, technologies and transformation strategies are continuously being tested. Researchers are therefore finding it challenging to keep track of the latest findings and ongoing trials and to identify current research desiderata. Research syntheses, e.g. in the form of critical reviews, can make an important contribution to summarising the state of research on a clearly defined topic in a structured way and thus making it useful for science and practice (Wright & Michailova 2022). Critical reviews, like other research syntheses, involve a systematic search, description and analysis of the literature available in relation to a specific research question. They focus primarily on conceptually grasping the research field and can thus contribute to further theory or model building in the field (Wilmers et al. 2020; Grant and Booth 2009). The focus is on a detailed search of existing literature, a narrative classification of this literature in the research context and an assessment of the significance of the literature with regard to its contribution to answering a respective research question, as well as the identification of research desiderata. Critical reviews are characterised by rather broad questions and can be used to synthesize studies qualitatively (Wetterich & Plänitz 2021). The presentation is based on a critical review of curriculum development in the school sector in the context of digitalisation. The search resulted in 2444 titles. Content, theoretical, empirical and methodological criteria were considered for the inclusion of a publication (Siddaway, Wood & Hedges 2019). Following further exclusion criteria on a formal (e.g. non-matching literature type or other language than English or German) and on a qualitative level (e.g. matching the research question or meeting basic scientific standards), 29 publications were finally included in the critical review. These included studies collected primary data using interviews, questionnaires and document analyses. In order to systematically assess the studies and their contents in the review, a theoretical framework was used as the underlying construct (Newman & Gough 2020). In this contribution, we would like to discuss the potentials and challenges of the methodology of critical reviews in educational research, particularly in the field of education in an era of digital change. This implies specific challenges such as dealing with an unpredictable number of literature findings or handling very heterogeneous sets of literature.

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